If you're new here, this blog will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years. The wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger on losing their jobs to the next wave of downsizing.
Here's more than a hundred online journals from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years.
Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before delving into the forum journals and looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation.

Work may be thought of as a form of self-expression. For instance, when I worked as a physicist, I considered the programs I wrote to simulate neutron stars and the papers I wrote about my understanding of the results a form of self-expression much in the same way a musician picks up a guitar.

There’s also a lot of work which can not be considered as such. The Ancient Greeks thought that such work was slavery. Their solution was to own slaves. Being more modern and delusionally sophisticated we have financialized slavery and created something called jobs. While people can no longer be owned like slaves, jobs can certainly be bought, sold, and owned. And seeing how most people need jobs, it’s effectively the same thing, plus ca change…

In fact a great deal of our culture deals with preparing people to live in a system where their jobs can be bought and sold. And like it!

The way out of working jobs is owning jobs. As a financially independent person who don’t need to work but who have achieved this state through investing, that is, job-ownership, I’m essentially just the parallel of a slave-owner, a job-owner.

I don’t really think this ongoing slave-mentality elevates humanity in any way. It may be more difficult to see these days as people have more rights, but most are still not free. This doesn’t reflect well on neither people who have jobs nor people who own the jobs through their investments.

This is not elevating humanity. It’s just a more sophisticated version of the same old.

An improvement would be a system where nobody need “jobs” whether that be as job-owners or jobbers. A system where living itself becomes self-expression.

Something has to change. It’s certainly isn’t working the way it could be… unfortunately those in charge have a pretty big stake in staying in charge. Perhaps there are ways to make it happen though.

Hoplite said,

It’s no mistake that employment law started as “master-servant”, including the laws in Britain that were used to imprison non-compliant workers.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_and_Servant_Act
The industrial revolution adapted the old forms to suit the new wineskins.

Gene said,

VERY good and worth exploring in more detail.

Marlene said,

Well, you might want to check out barter-organisations like LET´s or Noppes (Amsterdam based) or the biggest one in Argentina. For there the “money” cannot be used to store value and that changes the dynamic of work in my opinion.

Probably much too unscientifical for you but still maybe interesting as a starting idea would be the book “the five sacred things” from starhawk.

I’m reminded about the story of the gladiators they tell at the Colisseum. Only the best gladiators could buy their freedom at great expense and over many years. The promoters set their price very high. But if a gladiator did well the promoter didn’t want to lose him. So if the gladiator was a fortunate one that bought his freedom most of the time he didn’t know what to do with it. Of course the promoter was there scheming him out of money but pretending to help him out. Most gladiators found themselves back into debt and back into bondage to the same guy they just bought their freedom from. I feel there is some parallels there.

I agree. Most of us are raised and educated by well-meaning people to be slaves. Absolutely. Higher education student loans insure many years of slavery, as so many other forms of debt.

siredge said,

Here’s a couple thoughts- hope they are worth reading.

It seems to me that a person is ennobled by self-determination. If a person is able to, through the exercise of merits and effort, provide satisfaction of needs of one or more persons, that person will have greater confidence and capacity as a result of the endeavor. This builds over the course of a lifetime, so that people who have repeatedly had such successes have nearly complete confidence in their ability to achieve. Conversely, those that have rarely ever met needs on their own effort and merits will feel deeply insecure, knowing that they may not have the ability to handle new challenges. I believe this takes place whether solving problems for oneself or for an employer.

I believe that having a job is not a form of slavery- I believe that if I don’t have a job I like, I should go out and get a different one. I do believe that having a job is a trade between a stable, predictable paycheck and giving up several degrees of freedom (work hours, vacation days, methods employed, etc.). I also think that it is not a good long-term arrangement, since it the employee lacks income diversification. But it is still substantially different than slavery. Or, at least, so it seems to me.

i’m about to escape slavery, but apparently i’m about to enter slave ownership. not something i’m interested in.

the thing is, i’d like to build up my company such that i can hire people and treat them like real people with respect, but in the short term i planned to live off investments where, as you said, i act as a modern slave owner.

hmm, i suppose i need to think more about it too.

Ben said,

The upper echelons of today’s “slaves” may have more freedom than their ancient counter parts (see siredge’s comment). Freedom in our culture, basically, is facility and confidence with money. If you are raised to make the right sacrifices, you can earn enough money to have facility without confidence.
A few people are raised to have confidence, and thus get facility (see Rich Dad, Poor Dad).
A lot of people are raised to have neither, and so are the closest to being actual slaves.

What do we do? I agree with TJT- treat everyone with respect.

BTW Jacob- What are your thoughts on socially conscious investing? I know most of what I’ve seen are no better than your basic fund, but is there room in value investing for this?

It’s not an easy problem to contemplate, and certainly, at least until those jobs which no one wants to do are solved by technology, people would have to take turns doing them. I’m not sure where you stand politically, but the first time I was exposed to the idea of wage slavery, was through chomsky. He also viewed work as a form of self expression, and that humanity’s natural state is one of creative engagement and construction.

I not only agree, it’s what I’ve always thought. Human nature remains the same although layers of sophistication can obscure the view. The “advances” of “society” are completely laughable. In this job-slavery aspect, the only real advance, if you want to call it that, is that people now embrace slavery instead of having it imposed on them with an iron fist. The same pre-historic, animal intentions of man remain.

[…] Here is another blogpost that reflects some of my feelings on this subject: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/on-elevating-humanity.html […]

Denise said,

Don’t hold it against me, I’m a science-fiction reader. I’ll give most any sci-fi show or movie a shot too. Of my favorite, my all-time favorite (the only all-time I can agree with myself of having an all-time) is Arthur C. Clarke. I fell in love with his stories and other work as kid, and because he was so old then, and has since passed away, I made it a point to read one ‘new’ book of his every 2-4 years or so, so that I’ll always have a book of his to read, at least until I’m old.

Anyway, this is why I’m such an advocate of mining the asteroids and planets and eventually terraforming earth-similar planets (and re-terraforming the Earth-if we understand it by then) until we make no-impact/moving part/average resource using machines.

Speaking of machines, machines work about a 1k times more than all of current maximum human capacity to work (who among us works at full capacity all the time?) So, if we could build machines that do most of the jobs we do, then that would free up humans to contemplate nature, the celestial, transcendence, who knows. Talk about tapping into human potential!

On a much smaller, narrow scale, it’s akin to telling manufacture-workers, machines took your jobs, so go to school and learn to do something else, something higher up the job chain. Instead we’ll say, hey, machines took all the jobs, now either rush into hedonism, or contemplate the previously unfathomable (once one’s mind is free from 9-5/slave mentality, creativity could blossom) and transcend. I’m thinking both will happen.

Edward said,

I could take you to a part in my town where there’s “a system where nobody need “jobs” whether that be as job-owners or jobbers”. Trust me, it’s a scary, scary place. Unless you really like oxycodone?

Bob said,

Well…technically, nobody *is* forcing anyone to have a job. Anyone can just say “I quit!” and walk out.

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